Tech CEOs: Thou Art a Villain
This Fall is shaping up to be quite the year for scary movies. But this year's villains won't be Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers or Jason or Chucky – they'll be Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes and Mark Zuckerberg.
It is sort of wild how Artificial, The Social Reckoning, Musk, and You Can See Everything are all being released around the same time. A time when anti-tech sentiment is building and spreading, no less. Perhaps that's not a coincidence, and Hollywood has a long history of themed convergence – see also: Dante's Peak vs. Volcano in 1997, or Deep Impact vs. Armageddon in 1998 – but this is four widely buzzed-about movies all with key players in technology over the past decade as the focal points and antagonists.
But unlike the volcano or asteroid movies, all four of these are likely to be quite different. Artificial will be full-on about AI, and specifically the inner-personal and philosophical turmoil at OpenAI, which is sort of weird/wild since that story about that company and space is still very much being written in real time. The Social Reckoning is a sort of spiritual successor to The Social Network written by the same person, Aaron Sorkin, and now directed by him as perhaps a way to atone for the sins he felt he perpetuated with the feted first film. Musk is a documentary about you-know-who, which will undoubtedly touch on AI as well (and again, OpenAI specifically), but should also span his myriad other work from space to politics. And You Can See Everything is... well, something different – a sort of documentary, sort of performance art piece which centers around Holmes in the weeks before she goes to prison for the Theranos fraud, and seemingly some of the time afterwards.
I mean, if people were uneasy about the tech industry before these movies, they're probably going to fucking hate it afterwards.
At least, that's the early buzz around each of these films. The negative sentiment is so strong around Artificial that it seemingly led Amazon to drop it, despite already having paid for the entire production. To their credit, they didn't kill it outright, but handed it off to Neon to distribute and market. Why? Well, undoubtedly in part because $50B is bigger than $50M. Amazon's recent massive investment in OpenAI created the mother of all conflicts of interest.
For those keeping score at home, a movie about Melania Trump is totally fine, but a movie about Sam Altman is not in the eyes of Amazon. Obviously because one is viewed as a puff piece while the other may or may not be a hit piece.1
There was some concern/thought leading up to the release that perhaps Luca Guadagnino's film simply wasn't any good, which aided Amazon's decision. But with the movie having now premiered and some reviews starting to roll in, that's clearly not the case. In fact the buzz is now building for Andrew Garfield's portrayal of Altman, and even more so Yura Borisov's portrayal of OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, as potential Oscar contenders. (While Ike Barinholtz may steal the show in his scenes portraying Musk.)
Also getting some early Oscar buzz is Jeremy Strong for his portrayal of Zuckerberg. As the trailers make clear, he nailed the speech patterns,2 but his real challenge may be getting people to forget Jesse Eisenberg in the role. Those trailers also made it seem like The Social Reckoning, sadly, might not be the overall Oscar-worthy film that the first one was, and the early reviews seem to back up that sentiment, but I've long thought there was a good chance this film would be awful, and it seems like it will be better than that.3
And that matters because it means people may actually see it. Perhaps not as much as they saw The Social Network, but still, Aaron Sorkin's political message will likely be heard by some if not exactly the Facebook masses. Which is still more than Digger can say right now.
Speaking of studios dropping their divisive, conflicted movies, there was some chatter and fear that Universal would balk at releasing Alex Gibney's Musk documentary given that seemingly no one would be in a hurry to pick a fight with the world's only trillionaire who is famously litigious, politically connected, and terminally online, wielding his own social network. The fact that it's um, nearly four hours long couldn't have helped matters either. But those bailing rumors were seemingly unfounded (or at least backtracked), with Musk a go for (a limited release) blast off later this week.
This one will probably play better at home – again, it's four hours long – but Gibney has a history of getting his documentaries actually fairly widely seen. And the reviews are solid so far. So yes, that will be two movies featuring Musk in cineplexes soon.
Which leaves You Can See Everything, which looks to be the best of the bunch, albeit the weirdest, which is quite a feat given the subjects at play here. Will it kick off some sort of comeback for Holmes, perfectly timed for her release into a halfway home next year? Might she be the one who gets the antihero status that Sorkin and Eisenberg clearly regret giving to Zuckerberg that first go-around? With Nathan Fielder, it can seemingly go any number of ways!
Still, as of now, each of these movies is going to be a nightmare for the tech industry. And each in different ways. Attacking AI, attacking social networks, attacking Founder Mode™, attacking the whole fake-it-til-you-make-it (or just keep faking it) startup ethos. Attacking more or less the entire ecosystem.
Hollywood has a long history of treating tech poorly and villainous – even Her, a key movie of reference for the AI movement is a not-too-thinly veiled commentary on the cold technological connection to come – but this batch of films seemingly go far beyond mythical terminator robots, searching for Dr. Frankenstein, not his monster. And if they hit, tech may long for the days of debates about data centers.
To that end, in a way, this could be considered a pre-emptive strike against the industry that many in Hollywood fear is coming to destroy them. Streaming was the start, but AI is the finishing move. I'm skeptical of that for all sorts of reasons, but without question, Hollywood is going to change a lot over the next decade. And I suspect the movies about those doing the disruption – the tech villains – will ramp. Because if nothing else, Hollywood loves nothing more than movies about itself.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Is OpenAI aiming to counter the inevitable backlash of the film with a massive Vanity Fair profile/cover story – complete with the Annie Liebovitz photo shoot – about Altman? You decide. ↩
2 And apparently remained in character as Zuck throughout the entire shoot, as is his way. That must have been wild. ↩
3 Though a good rule of thumb is to never trust the initial reactions after early screenings (which are almost always positive given the access dynamic), the actual reviews hit tomorrow. Still, I get the sense that The Social Reckoning is fine. Not as good as The Social Network, of course. And preachy in the way that Sorkin sometimes is, and over-written in the way that Sorkin almost always is, but not awful. ↩